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A lookout’s shrill warning, “Ship, dead ahead!” rang out from the bow of the luxury transatlantic liner Arctic.
Suddenly, out of the chill, swirling autumn mists that shrouded Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, a three-masted auxiliary screw steamer materialized. Before the lumbering, 284-foot sidewheel passenger liner could alter course, the vessels struck a glancing blow.
The unconcerned passengers, assembled in the Arctic's dining saloon for the drawing of the ship’s lottery before luncheon—the merid' ian had just been passed—felt only a serif5 ) of jolts as the smaller craft caromed off the liner’s paddlewheel guards and passed aster11' Veteran Captain James C. Luce of the Arctic rushed out of the charthouse, where he had been working out the ship’s noon positio'1’ just in time to see a vessel, her bow badb stove in and her foremast down with a tangy of sails and rigging overside, before she dis appeared again, swallowed up in the f°f>‘
Luce felt no particular alarm for his own strongly-built but uncompartmented wooden ship, then the largest, finest, and swiftest in the entire U. S. Merchant Marine. In fact, she had been certified when new by Captain Matthew Calbraith Perry, U. S. Navy, on 8 October 1850, as a steamer “of the first class,” acceptable by the Navy for conversion in time °f war. But the other participant in the collision was obviously a goner, Luce thought.
The Arctic had departed Liverpool on 20 September 1854, and was due to arrive in New York on the 30th. On 27 September, “The 'veather had been foggy during the day,” Laptain Luce recalled. “Generally a distance °f half to three-quarters of a mile could be Seen, but at intervals of a few minutes a very dense fog followed by being sufficiently clear to see one or two miles. ...”
Luce had posted two lookouts on the Arctic’s forecastle head, but saw no reason to reduce foe ship’s normal cruising speed of 13 knots, Provided by a pair of thousand-horsepower s'de-lever engines turning the 25-foot wrought Ir°n paddlewheels at 16 r.p.m. Steam at 17 Pounds pressure was generated in four double- r*veted iron tubular boilers, fired by Pennsylvania anthracite on the eastbound trips and ^elsh bituminous west-bound.
The sky had obligingly cleared at noon and *foptain Luce took a meridian altitude which Placed the ship in 46°45' north latitude, advancing the dead reckoning to 52°60' west °ngitude eastward of Cape Race, Newfound- and. He was working out the sight when the fochc entered the fog bank.
The Vesta, a bark-rigged iron auxiliary sfoamer, with three transverse iron bulkheads c°mpartmenting her hull, was 152 feet long c°mpared to the Arctic’s 284. She had a fair "fod and, as was the custom of low-powered ^earners of the time, was proceeding under °fo sail and steam. A tender to the French foing colony in the Western Hemisphere, p*e had left the island of St. Pierre the day be- 0re with fishermen passengers and their Possessions embarked on a return voyage to . lePpe. Evidently the lookouts in both vessels s|Shted the other ship on a collision course
^‘aultaneously. “Luff, luff! There’s a ship earing down upon us!” the Vesta’s lookout as reported to have cried.
Since the vessel with which the Arctic had collided seemed doomed, Captain Luce’s instincts immediately were to do all he could to save her people. His-initial order, then, was to send his first mate, Robert J. Gourlay, and half a dozen seamen in one of the Arctic’s six lifeboats to lend a hand. Gourlay’s boat was already gone, swallowed up in the fog, when Luce received his first intimation that the Arctic, too, was seriously damaged. Immediately he rescinded the order to launch a second boat. Water, he now learned, was pouring deep into the Arctic’s hull through two jagged rents below the bow.
Luce at once sent the carpenter below to try to get at the holes from inside to stuff them with mattresses. Sails were let down over the bow to try to check the inflow. It proved impossible to plug the holes, however, since the broken iron anchor stock of the Vesta, shorn in the collision, protruded so that it prevented any patch from fitting snugly. Meanwhile, every passing moment put the Arctic further down by the head.
Captain Luce then faced as hard a decision as ever was presented to a shipmaster. He might be able to save the Vesta's survivors and retrieve his own small boat—but the effort might cost him his own ship and the lives of all those on board. Newfoundland lay only about 40-odd miles away. Steam pumps and the Arctic’s main engine bilge injectors undoubtedly could contrive to keep her afloat for some little time. He made his agonizing decision: he would try for land. There was no time to lose. Without stopping to look for the Vesta or even the lifeboat carrying his first mate, Luce ordered full speed ahead.
Things went fairly well for the first hour, though the ship was settling appreciably lower and lower in the water and her speed decreased as the churning paddlewheels became less and less effective. The Arctic’s four boilers were equipped with two sets of furnaces each, one above the other. It was not long before the water was lapping under the fireroom floor and inching its way ever higher to the grate bars. Then there came a deafening hiss and clouds of acrid smoke arose, as the lower fires were snuffed out. It was only a few minutes more before the upper fires were also extinguished. The paddlewheels made a last fitful turn, the Worthington pumps spat
80 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1968
out a final trickle. The ship’s doom was sealed.
Captain Luce was preparing the lifeboats—• which at best could have handled only half of the ship’s company—to receive passengers as soon as the Arctic should stop. Suddenly, fear-crazed firemen and sailors swarmed the decks, rushing the boats and battling and shoving women and children aside. One group of engineers, brandishing revolvers, coolly appropriated one boat for its exclusive use, provisioned it well, and shoved off.
Captain Luce, severely handicapped without his chief officer to support him, watched helplessly as two boats he had ordered astern to take on women and children were quietly rowed away only partially filled—their occupants subsequently testifying that it had not seemed “prudent” to take any more people into them. At last, only one small boat remained. Reluctantly, Luce had it launched, keeping back the oars, however, in order to provide his third mate a platform from which a raft of spars and timbers might be assembled with the help of willing passengers. But in the end, this boat, too, was rushed and cut adrift.
Four hours after the collision, the Arctic sank, taking more than half of the people on board down with her. Some 70 men and four women had stationed themselves on the in- completed raft that lay alongside. But only one was to survive two dreadful days and nights on board it. Captain Luce, true to the tradition of the sea, mounted one of the Arctic’s half-moon-shaped paddleboxes, his command station in happier times, and went down with the ship. But even this final, gallant gesture would be thwarted. The paddle- box broke away from the hull and bounded to the surface, landing upside down. The resultant “craft,” looking like a Chinese junk, nevertheless was to save the life of the captain and two passengers.
In the final accounting, three boats were lost at sea—the first mate’s boat that went on its abortive errand of mercy, the engineers’ boat, and one other. The two boats that sneaked away partially filled contrived to reach Broad Cove, Newfoundland, in safety under oars with a total of 45, the majority of them crew, on board. Passing ships picked up the sixth lifeboat loaded down to a scant 6-inch freeboard with 31 survivors. Picked up, too, were some ten men, including Luce, clinging precariously to rafts and flotsam.
Repercussions from the sinking of the Arctic, with the loss of approximately 350 lives, were widespread. Astonishingly, the small iron-hulled French steamer Vesta, though apparently seriously injured, was saved by her watertight compartments, and she limped into port at St. John’s, Newfoundland, a hundred miles away, without further loss of life.
The Arctic’s sinking was made more poignant by reason of the fact that every single woman and child on board perished. All of the 87 survivors, who managed to reach land or were picked up from the lifeboats or rafts, were crewmen or male passengers of demonstrated strength and agility. It was, in truth, “Women and Children Last.”
Except for actual participants and their grief-stricken families, the sinking of the Arctic probably impressed a Boston shipowner and merchant named Robert Bennet Forbes more than anyone else. Captain Ben Forbes had had vast experience both as a practical seafaring man, commanding his own ships ofl the China Station, and in all phases of maritime endeavor, concerning which he was 3 prolific writer. In 1855, he published a pamphlet entitled Remarks on Ocean Steam Navigation, inspired by the disaster, in which he stated that “the terrible fate of the Arc tit
But he did make one suggestion of vital import, which he then followed up. Iminedi- amiy after the Arctic tragedy, he sounded out , . world’s foremost navigation authority— b*s friend
Mi
and the loss of so many valuable lives is a theme about which too much cannot be said at this juncture, while the public heart is bleeding.” He cited the vital need for shipboard organization and discipline and, when bis friend Captain Luce was criticized for maintaining full speed (13 knots) in fog, he held that Luce was only “doing what the proprietors of all the Atlantic steamers try to d°! and boast when done; namely, to make the shortest passage to beat all competitors.” Forbes also made pithy observations on maintaining proper lookouts, and the need for adequate lifeboats and crews trained to Use them—thoughts that had been sadly Overlooked when, 58 years later, the Titanic sailed her first and last voyage with authorized lifeboat accommodation for only 52 per Cent of the persons she was permitted to carry.
Forbes stated that his remarks were “not made in a fault-finding or captious spirit” and recognized the fact that it was much easier, while sitting by our firesides, and aher the disaster, to suggest what ought to have been done.”
Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine aury—concerning the practicability of lay- lng down separate lanes for ships plying be- tVveen Europe and America. Maury got to ^ork on the plan right away, advising alter R. Jones, president of the Atlantic g ^tual Insurance Company in New York on November 1854 that he had this project in ^and and reporting back to Forbes on 14 ecember that he was definitely sure he c°nld work out a satisfactory system. “If eamers would agree to follow two such °utes I think I could lay them off so as to Ve them quite separate except at the two ends,” he conciuc[ecp
arly the next year, Maury also received sh' rri>a^ recluest from a group of prominent mpping and insurance men in Boston, inCaptain Forbes, John S. Sleeper, odi Cartwright, J. Ingersoll Bowditch, and t ,?.rs> asking him to perfect his idea of es- lsmng tentative steamship lanes and to r 0r<a them on a chart “exhibiting the es suggested, so laid out as may in your
judgment, best answer the purpose of lessening the liability of collision without materially lengthening the passage.”
Within five weeks the work was completed and interested parties both in New York and Boston were provided with the required charts and tables of distance embodied in a long letter dated 15 February 1855. Maury’s “letter” was published by the Board of Underwriters in New York soon after its receipt and received additional dissemination by appearing in the June 1855 issue of Griffiths and Bates’ authoritative Nautical Magazine. It was included in the 1859 enlarged eighth edition of Maury’s Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany Wind and Current Charts, and subsequently came out as a separate pamphlet publication of the U. S. Hydrographic Office (No. 40, 1872), indicating the U. S. Navy’s official endorsement.
Entitled “Lanes for the Steamers Crossing the Atlantic, by M. F. Maury, L.L.D., Lieutenant, U. S. Navy,” the preamble read:
The disaster which befell the U. S. Mail steamer Arctic, on her passage from Liverpool to New York, in the month of October [actually on September 27, though word of her loss did not reach New York until October 11], 1854, in consequence of her coming in collision with the French steamer Vesta, in a thick fog, forty or fifty miles eastward of Cape Race, first appalled the public mind with its enormity, and then aroused it. . . .
Among many benevolent persons who favored the public with their thoughts upon the subject, some suggested measures remedial, and some preventative. Life-boats and life- preservers, water-tight compartments, station-bills for passengers and crew to “save ship” were among the remedial plans; and among those for prevention were, fog-signals, true compass, rate of sailing, lookout, and lanes, or a double track for steamers crossing this part of the Atlantic, viz.: a lane for them to go in and another for them to come in.
All or any of these plans would, if adopted, tend more to diminish or mitigate the dangers of steam navigation. . . .
Maury then squared away with a full and meticulous description of the lanes he had devised. Two lanes were laid down on great circle courses, and, for the most part, were parallel to each other, though, of necessity, they came together at the terminals. Each
82 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1968
was 20 to 25 miles wide and with a wider “neutral” space lying in between. At their point of widest separation, the lanes were some 300 miles apart. Vessels bound from Europe for Canadian or U. S. ports were assigned the northern lane, while those which were eastbound across the Atlantic were given the southern lane where they received an extra boost from the Gulf Stream, “a route where the weather is fine and delightful,” Maury himself later wrote a friend, the Rt. Rev. James H. Otey, Bishop of Tennessee, from shipboard. Meteorological considerations suggested moving the lanes farther south in winter, but it worked out that the southern lane was never much longer than the northern one, anyway. Between Ambrose Lightship, New Jersey, and Bishop Rock, near Plymouth, England, the northern lane was scaled at 2,902 miles; the southern
lane, 2,966 miles; and the “extra southern”
(to avoid icebergs), 3,004 miles.
Supporting tables of distances were pro- , vided for seaports in both hemispheres. Branching routes handled traffic peeling off for Canadian ports on one side and various European ones on the other. Caution in behalf of fishing vessels working the Grand j Banks was cited.
In conclusion, Maury specifically stated that his plan was designed to lessen “liabilities by diminishing the chances of collision,' but it was “not intended to relax diligence on the part of the master.” He recommended that his suggestions be adopted forthwith by all steamship lines and that the ship lanes be , engraved on all North Atlantic charts regardless of nationality. He also made an earnest | appeal “that steamship masters follow the lanes and sailing ships keep out of them.’
By and large, however, seafaring men are * hard to change and, initially, use of the lanes had been entirely voluntary. When the eighth edition of his Sailing Directions came out in 1859, Maury cited the material increase in the number of transatlantic steamships, giving tables for 1857 to indicate that there had been some 374 transoceanic passages that year exclusive of warships. This averaged 14 steamers at one time being if transit on the high seas. Maury concluded ‘ with justified petulance:
Three years have now passed since the lanes were projected. The crowded state of the sea renders recognition and use of these lanes of more and more importance. . . . The following summary of wrecks and collisions ought ; to plead, trumpet-tongued, in favor of our lanes.
It was bitterly ironical that one ship included in this summary was the Arctic’s sister ship, the Pacific. She vanished without trace in 1856 on a winter westbound passage from Liverpool, with the loss of 186 passengers and 1 crew.
At length, however, what resistance there was to the plan subsided, possibly owing to the continued endorsement of the ship lanes on the part of the U. S. Navy which had required its ships to take them from the begin- i ning. But collisions at sea still continued to occur and, following the spectacular sinking of the French auxiliary screw passenger liner
A graduate of Yale University in 1928, Commander Brown served on active duty from 1942 to 1946. In 19451946 he assisted naval historian Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison with the first drafts of Operational History of the U. S. Navy in World War II. An Associate Editor of The American Neptune: A Quarterly Journal of Maritime History, he is the author of many Articles and reviews of maritime and naval subjects. Te has been literary editor of The Daily Press, Newport News, Virginia, since 1951.
Commander Brown’s great-grandfather, James “r°wn, was president of the Collins Line and lost five ^embers of his family when the Arctic went down.
^ tile Du Havre with a loss of 222 lives on 23 November 1873, after a midnight collision '■v'th the full-rigged ship Loch Earn, the Lon- d°n Times editorialized: “If she had followed Saury’s steam lanes, this terrible loss of life and ship would have been avoided.”
. This censure might not have been entirely Justified, however. The Ville Du Havre, bound her namesake city and about 1,500 miles °ut of New York, went down according to a New York Times story of 2 December 1873, in ^ 21' north latitude by 35° 31' west longitude. This placed her some seven miles on t^e north side of the appropriate lane for Castbound steamers. It might well have been the sailing vesssel that was partially responsi- c> for sailing ships were enjoined to keep Weh away from the steam lanes.
The larger steamship companies did adopt the use of the lanes, though, and the Cunard h*ne stated with some pride that travelers could trust the safety of its vessels since they adhered to “Maury’s Steam Lanes.” Simi- arly, reporting a transatlantic voyage on the Shiite Star liner Republic made in 1874, Arthur J. Maginnis reported “through mist and storm we keep with singular fidelity to
Commander Maury’s steam lanes for outward-bound vessels. Maury’s lanes are now well known.”
Frances Leigh Williams, in her scholarly biography of Maury, cites the calling of a marine conference in Washington in 1889 “to decide the momentous question of fixed routes for steamers crossing the North Atlantic” and a final acceptance in 1898 by the principal maritime powers of a plan virtually similar to Maury’s route of 1855. After the loss of the Titanic in 1912, steamship operators agreed to dip a little farther south to avoid icebergs. However, this was not a modification of the sea lane, C. Alphonso Smith pointed out in his published address at the unveiling of a tablet to Maury at Goshen Pass in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, 9 June 1923, but only a modification of the change-over from Maury’s more northern to his more southern route.
“The present safety of Atlantic travel owes a very real debt to Maury’s early charting of the lanes,” Miss Williams sums up this important episode of the famous oceanographer’s career.
But while Maury’s work on the lanes is universally conceded, the Arctic and the 350-odd souls who perished on that bleak September afternoon more than a century ago have been given scant recognition as the reasons for it all. With the exception of the four-line citation given in Miss Williams’ book (more appears in her footnotes, however), none of Maury’s other biographers—his daughter Diana Fontaine Maury Corbin, Jaquelin Ambler Caskie, John W. Wayland, or Professor Charles Lee Lewis—even mention the ill-fated liner by name.
Maury’s ship lanes were of vital import. But in remembering the contribution of this great and deservedly famous scientist, the Arctic and the 350 innocent persons who perished with her on that fateful day should surely not be forgotten.
★